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Q&A: Cain’s Offering

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This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Cain’s Offering

Question

Why didn’t the Holy One, blessed be He, accept Cain’s offering? What was undesirable about him or about his offering?

Answer

I don’t deal with the Bible.

Discussion on Answer

Boris Karshina (2024-10-30)

Cain asked his mother, why did you call me Cain?
And she told him, “I have acquired a man with the Lord” — you’re an exalted and special man, I made you with the Lord.
He got full of himself, it went to his head, and he became a show-off, and he brought an offering to the Lord out of that showiness. The Lord did not accept his offering. Later on he became the first murderer in history.

When people become show-offs, nonsense goes to their heads and they lose everything.

Jeremiah warns them that their corruption will bring destruction, but it went to their heads that they had the Temple of the Lord in their midst and destruction could never happen. They said to him, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord” — the end is known.

Also in the days of the Second Temple, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was realistic and argued that they must not provoke the Romans.
But it went to their heads that they had the Temple of the Lord in their midst, and they argued to him that there would be no destruction because the Lord had promised them through the prophet Jeremiah, “Your iniquity is ended, daughter of Zion; He will no more carry you away into exile.” So they did not listen to Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had to leave the city disguised as a dead man. The end is known.

The same is true today — we’ve become show-offs. We’ve attained what was not attained for 2,000 years.
It went to our heads. They recommend indicting someone for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, they carry out a regime coup, destroy democracy, drive the best people away from here — the destruction is known in advance. But the showiness and the arrogance drive away success and bring destruction, and with the rabbis who did not merit it, it becomes a deadly poison for them…
So we have learned a good lesson from Cain.

Showiness that brings arrogance, that brings destruction.

That is how the Lord embedded it in His world, and also in the Land of Israel.

Boris Karshina (2024-10-30)

So too in our Torah portion, the generation of the Flood felt cocky and full of themselves; there were giants among them, there were “sons of God” among them.
Wow, they felt corruption was permitted to them.
And destruction came.

In short, Bibi and rabbis crazed with imagined, delusional, exalted redemptions are bringing destructions and disasters upon us — massacre, killing, captivity, disgrace, and plunder, and in the end probably annihilation too.

May it be His will that we wake up in time,
cast out from our midst the corruption of the rabbis and Bibism,
and return to being a light unto the nations, without the showiness that brings arrogance that brings destruction.

Nir (2024-11-01)

Hello
In general, in my view Cain represents the bad character traits in the passage, and Abel the good character traits.
The father of bad traits is pride, and the father of good traits is humility.

The precise essence of the trait of pride is egocentricity (ego = I, and centrum = center).
A proud person feels that he is the center of everything and looks only for how to satisfy his own desires, even at the expense of others.

You can see Cain’s pride in several ways:
1. When Eve gives him his name, she says, “I have acquired a man with the Lord,” meaning that in her pride she saw herself as divine.
Only when Abel was born did she understand that this is the nature of the world, and she called her second son Abel, because she understood that she is not divine and that it is vanity.
That is also why, in my view, it is not written in the passage why she gave Abel that name, because it is tied to Cain’s name.

2. Cain works the soil — the soil is the low and natural side of a person, and he cares only about the natural side and not about spiritual life, unlike Abel, who is a shepherd, meaning that he manages his character traits, giving the body what the body needs and the soul what the soul needs.

3. Psychopaths are egocentric, and Cain is a psychopath who murders his brother.
That’s why psychopaths have no problem harming others — because they are egocentric, they are not empathetic enough to feel another’s suffering.

4. As for your question, Cain also gives the Lord the lesser part of his produce and keeps the best for himself, thereby showing that he puts himself at the center and the Lord second (and Abel the opposite), which again displays his pride.

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